Not everyone approves of jurors who doodle in the margins of their notepads. (Who can forget the British rape verdict that was overturned partly because a juror "made two sketches of the judge while he should have been concentrating on the evidence"?) Here at Deliberations, though, we love doodling jurors, defend their honor, and maintain the American Gallery of Juror Art to showcase their best work.
It is with delight, then, that we report on this new study, strongly suggesting that doodling jurors are better jurors:
Doodling while listening can help with remembering details, rather than implying that the mind is wandering as is the common perception. According to a study published today in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, subjects given a doodling task while listening to a dull phone message had a 29% improved recall compared to their non-doodling counterparts.
Apparently spontaneous doodling, like jury deliberation, is hard to test directly, so researchers told half their subjects to "shade in shapes on a piece of paper" while they listened to a tape with a long list of names and places. The other half just listened, and both groups tried to write down the sixteen names and places that were supposedly connected to a party. Asked to remember names afterward without looking at their lists, "[t]he doodlers [okay, shape-shaders] recalled on average 7.5 names of people and places compared to only 5.8 by the non-doodlers."
"Sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance"
The researchers' explanation for this makes a lot of sense. When a task is boring, your brain will inevitably do something to cope, and that something usually involves tuning out: daydreaming, planning ahead, reminiscing. When your brain's coping strategy is doodling, though, you can still pay attention, and so you retain more:
"[S]tudy researcher Professor Jackie Andrade, Ph.D., of the School of Psychology, University of Plymouth [said,] 'Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task.'"
So doodle on, juror artists. And send your work here when the trial is over.
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(Illustration by Christine Buckman Tillman from the American Gallery of Juror Art; all rights reserved to Christine Buckman Tillman.)
